In the past few months I've had so much to say I haven't known what to say. I haven't been perfectly happy and satisfied to let others speak and hope that they speak for me, at least partly, but so many people have been saying so much it's been all I can do to listen to it all, much less coalesce all those swirling ideas into a cohesive point.
But, as for so many of us, yesterday was a last straw. I don't say "the" last straw, because it seems as if our capacity for straws has grown ever more capacious since January. Every time we say, "I don't know how much more I can take" or "how much worse can it get?" it turns out we actually can endure more and it can, indeed, get worse. In fact, I don't know anyone who really has an idea of what the bottom looks like. We seem to continue to learn that we have not yet reached it, whatever it is.
The thought that continues to bother my mind is the idea that there are sides -- good guy, bad guy; left, right; pro-Trump, anti-Trump; protesters, anti-protesters. While this helps in terms of discussion of facts, it does not help us come together. If what we want is to find fault and place blame, then this premise - that there is Us and there is Them - is very useful. But if what we want is to heal, and love, and come to peace - and I guess we do need to ask ourselves if that truly is what we want - then there needs to be a way to equate us to each other.
The reason that sounds, right off the bat, impossible, is because at a gut level we want to find nothing in common with someone who - and let me just stay in the context of the last few days - claims that Jews are trying to erase white Christianist men (I can't call them Christian, because they're definitively not), or that African Americans are less than human, or that the only value a woman has is in her uterus. We find it abhorrent to view ourselves as like them, or of the same family, because ideas, rhetoric, and outward actions are what lead us to judge people as bad or as good, as admirable or as despicable. This makes it easier to define our tribe, and once we do that, we can define ourselves. We can describe ourselves when we know to which group we belong. And, above all, we can claim our moral rectitude. Our righteousness. Our value.
Of course it is disgusting to state and to act as if other human beings are lesser beings because of their skin color or religion or orientation. And it is a small man who feels he must take up arms (or torches or pitchforks) to be heard. It is a small man who tries to make others small so he can feel big. It is a small man who believes he is entitled to society's spoils because he was born with white skin and a penis and into a family that occasionally or more went to church, and that others are trying to take those spoils from him. Others who don't deserve it because they are not male, not white, not straight, and not Christianist. This is a small man who thinks he is angry, and that causing fear in others makes him strong. A small man places blame for his inadequacies and perceived misfortunes everywhere outside of himself and never on himself. Maybe we all do this, a little. But most of us do not act on this blame to the extent that we make other human beings, in our minds, less than human.
This tiny, sniveling, cowardly man is, though, still a man. He is, still, a human being. It would make us just like him to claim that he is less valuable just because we find him vile and disgusting. He is, at the very center, where he lives, terrified. He is terrified that we are right, and that he is less valuable. So he claims that others are. He is terrified that he will lose what he has - and he is right to be, if we have anything to say about it. Right in his prison cell, he will lose it. He is terrified that someone who is not like him will take what he has - a society that bends itself largely to his benefit. And he may be right about this too - someone might. Someone smarter, stronger, kinder, and less entitled. Because he is losing. He is losing his white-straight-male-based world where he is king. Why? Because the world is realizing that that world is not a great place for most of us. He is, thus, a despot kicking and screaming as he gets dragged from his throne by a world whose goal is to be a good one for more people. People other than just him.
As hard as it is, it is imperative, if we are not to be like him and wish simply for his demise, to view him as a sick, fearful human being who has so little innate self-respect that he must manufacture it by being a terrorist (which is just a great big scary word that means bully). We don't have to like him. No. I'm not that good. And if he commits a crime, he belongs in jail. But we only add to the hate if we hate him. We do nothing to bring about the world that we want - and that he wants, too, in his true heart, the one he hasn't acknowledged since maybe forever- if we hate. If we make some people good and others bad. That's just what he has done.
So. What do we do? We can levy practical consequences for his behavior, for sure. But we must not make him, in our minds, less than human. He is pitiful and pathetic. But once he was a newborn and and infant and a toddler who learned how to walk and talk and blow his nose. He has deserved love his whole life just like the people we like. He is just a man, if a small, offensive one withered by primeval fear. If what we want, in our dark hearts, is to find a way to be better than him, then let's be smug about the fact that we can keep hate out of our hearts and just land at pity. Take out wishing for his misfortune and replace it with satisfaction that his attempts have been thwarted. Stop wasting time being upset by his racism, sexism, and homophobia and start listening to how alienated, disconnected, and profoundly bereft he feels, even if it's because he has relied on lies as a premise. This is a man who is almost impossible, by earthly standards, to love. And, at some level, way down in the pit of his soul, he knows this. Thus the blaming of forces outside himself for his circumstances. He can't even look at himself, so self-despising, at true-self level, is he. What must it be like to feel, in the end, that you are unworthy of love.
But here's the hard thing: God loves him. Yep. I went there. There is an eternal, changeless love in the universe, and this pathetic, sick man is beloved in it. And it prevails on us to love him too. Not in an earthly, sentimental, sweet way. But in a way that calls on his humanity and reminds him that he is, in his truest essence, good. That he has value, and that it is only up to him to squander it. We may never be able to convince him that his happiness lies in giving, not taking, and in finding reasons to love and not reasons to hate. But we can die trying. Why? Because that is who we truly are, too.
I'm not saying you need to be super sweet to this guy or give him presents or cover him with kisses. Ew. No. I am just saying that compassion is the wisest thing we can do. It gives him a fighting chance to be redeemed, if not in the world, then in his own heart. But it makes us better, too. It delivers us further from the hole of hate that we have so condemned him for living in.
I'm not sure this is possible for most of us, or many of us, or even for some of us. If I ran across this guy I'm not sure I'd be any good at it. But let's try wanting to. Baby steps, people. Vitriol gets us nowhere. And since we haven't really yet given love, on the whole, a try, let's. I doubt it can hurt. I didn't say it will feel satisfactory the way landing a right hook would. But it might help. Continuing the violence - of hand or of heart - never will.
